Sharing 260 years of marriage
Sharing 260 years of marriage
By ALLAN TINKER
Two couples have spent more time together in marriage than many other couples. Marvin and Mildred Kissee and Erwin and Wilma Pfennig, have been married for 65 years, totaling 260 years among the four of them.
They celebrated their anniversaries with friends at the McClusky Senior Center in January, enjoying the close-knit community of friends in cards, refreshments and socializing.
Pfennigs were married on Jan. 21, 1945. She was 18 when they married and she had worked at home on her family’s farm before marrying Erwin. They then worked together on his folks’ farm (Jake and Caroline ((Koenig)) Pfennig) and then farmed 10 years on their own at the same place when his parents moved to Driscoll.
In 1956, the couple moved to McClusky after they purchased the former Carl Schatz farm. They raised “everything,” said Wilma: beef cattle, grain, and milk cows; 26 of the latter, milking them by hand, just the two of them, so the boys could do other farm chores.
Their children are Darvin, (Barbara Rasmussen); Dallas (Connie Helm); Linda (Roger) Gill; and Beatrice (Calvin) Gill (that’s right, they married brothers!); Myron (Nancy Feist) and Virgil (Cyndy Weber). There are four grandchildren: two boys and two girls; and three great-grandsons.
Erwin has four brothers and four sisters; one brother died. Wilma had just one sister, who died when she was just three years old. Her parents were Otto and Lydia (Kraft) Weidrich. They both attended country schools for their elementary years and neither graduated from high school.
